The UNB Fredericton Campus viewed from the Saint John river &nbsp&nbsp

INTRODUCTION

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is probably the most flexible and powerful diagnostic imaging technique available
to clinical medicine. MRI in material science promises to observe and quantify structure and dynamics evolving non-invasively
as a function of treatment, processing, use or conditioning. However, such applications have been frustrated by the inability
of traditional MRI techniques to observe the very short lived magnetic resonance signals typically encountered outside of the
pure liquid state.

The UNB MRI Centre has invented a family of new MRI methods which permit the ready visualization of mobile and immobile
1H containing structures not only in vivo, but in a large range of materials including concrete, polymers,
composites, food materials and microporous solids. The successful application of our new MRI techniques, with allied hardware
and software innovations, has opened entirely new vistas in material science research. The UNB MRI Centre is one of the
largest and best known material science MRI laboratories world-wide and the leading university based laboratory of its type
in North America. As the birthplace of the SPRITE MRI technique we are, by definition, one of the leading laboratories world-wide
in many aspects of material science MRI. Our ideas and techniques are now being adopted by numerous academic and industrial
research laboratories.